Need for speed

This is a discussion on Need for speed within the Sky Broadband help forums, part of the Sky Broadband help and support category; As a nation we want the fastest download speed possible
what do you use your broadband for to justify the ...

Some Advice.. Its always advisable to inform your old ISP as soon as you have migrated that you have moved.
______________________________________

If you would like to know the straight line distance to your exchange thenclick here
Would you like an idea of the possible speeds you will get with the Max Package then click here or for the Connect Package then click here

Well, I have a serious response. Funnily enough, I did the arithmetic on this a few days ago and was staggered. Most of us have been pretty bombarded with anecdotes about how must faster CPUs are today vs 10/20/30 years ago, but check out this statistic (of my own making)...

I fairly often download big pieces of software for testing, the biggest being fairly regular downloads of various Linux distributions which can be a single iso image of about 3.3GB. I have an ADSL 8Mb connection (UK Online) that syncs at about 7.2Mbps and takes about 80 to 85 minutes to download such a file (I've used 83 minutes as a typical figure).

Now, in my last apartment in the early 90s (1992-ish) I used dialup and with a 56Kb modem I would typically get a connect speed of about 46Kbps. With that connection I would have needed to stay online constantly for 207 hours, i.e. about 1 week, 1 day and 15 hours (a practical impossibility by the way, the connection to an ISP would never stay alive that long).

Going even further back, modems started out even slower, but personally I would say that 9600bps were the first fairly widely deployed home modems (although others might make a case for even lower speeds). If we assume that people did all get full 9600bps connections with these modems (I can't remember what sort of actual connect speeds I used to get), then those users would have needed to stay online for over 43 days (over 6 weeks!!!) to download that same file that I can download in 83 minutes and someone who gets full Sky Max speeds would get the file in just over 37 minutes. In the even earlier 1200bps days we would now be talking about staying online continuously for pretty much exactly one year to download a 3.3GB file!

Personally, even as a computer scientist (who sometimes doesn't stop and think about the practicalities of these things) I find the above somewhat mind-bending. (Of course noone would have had any hard drive even close to big enough to store this file on of course.)